This story has made my Lucky Charms taste a little less magically delicious.

General Mills updated their online Privacy Policy to say that anyone who's received any benefit from them -- even downloading an online coupon, or liking their Facebook page -- can't sue them. Instead, they must settle any disputes about the purchase or use of any of their products in forced arbitration. Is this legal?

Yesterday a friend of mine told me about the very convincing bit of spam he received from someone posing as Facebook's legal department telling him he is part of a class action lawsuit. Turns out, it's not spam. Facebook just settled a class action lawsuit for $20 million and is looking to pay out. There won't be much left if the 150 million U.S. Facebook users claim their cut, but it's better than nothing. Although, if too many people file claims, then nobody gets anything.

Turns out, businesses offering folks free vouchers or coupons that don't include expiration dates is probably not a good idea. If something changes, and those businesses suddenly decide to stop honoring those vouchers, they could find themselves in hot water. That's what happened with Southwest Airlines. See, the company had previously offered free drink vouchers to their Business Select passengers as an added incentive. They changed their policy, basically voided all of the old vouchers, were sued, and are now on the hook for around 5.8 million free drinks thanks to a recent settlement.

In the wake of a series of invasive hacks earlier this year, Battle.Net users are taking their anger and frustration out on Blizzard with a new class action lawsuit. While lawsuits are par for the course when it comes to potentially leaking users' credit card information, it seems that WoW and Diablo III fans are enraged over a different aspect of the scandal. Rather than focusing on the allegedly lackluster security of Battle.Net, users are suing over the fact that Blizzard tried to take advantage of the event by strongly recommending that insecure users buy the Battle.Net authenticator, a little keychain dongle that generates random passwords for players' accounts.
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Netflix can be a pain for those that are unable to hear or have partial hearing loss. Their subtitles and closed captioning are haphazardly implemented throughout their Watch Instantly service. Some titles will feature robust settings while others have none at all. That's all set to change though. Thanks to the tireless efforts of the National Association for the Deaf, Netflix has agreed to provide closed captioning on all their Watch Instantly content by 2014.

Over the past year, there's been a slew of Terms of Service updates pushed through by various companies to prevent their users from joining class-action lawsuits. Sony's already on the bandwagon, as is Netflix. AT&T's had a similar clause for some time now. Not content to let other businesses have all the fun, PayPal has finally decided that they too like this idea of not being involved in class-action lawsuits. The update hits November 1st, and they've made opting out of it a hassle, because of course they did.

One of the ways that companies can be sued is if a bunch of plaintiffs band together under a class-action lawsuit. This provides those folks the ability to sue even if their own specific piece of the pie is too small to normally do so. As of late, companies have been updating their terms of service and subscriber agreements to outlaw users from doing just such a thing. With an update to Steam's subscriber agreement, beloved Valve Software is the latest to prohibit class-action lawsuits.

Netflix was recently slapped with a class-action lawsuit from disgruntled investors who claim that the company withheld information before the company's stock-price drop that happened over last summer and fall. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court of Northern California by the City of Royal Oak Retirement System, on behalf of all plaintiffs similarly situated.